Geeks, like any other culture, fetishize everything; movies, music, books, clothing, accessories, toys, video games, anything even loosely related to the internet. But geeks possibly more than any other culture communalize their fetishes. Community is everything in the subsets of geekdom. It’s what keeps conventions like Dragon*Con in yearly business. This characteristic isn’t confined to the geek set, but I think they exemplify it, possibly because acceptance and belonging is so deeply encoded in their personal trip. Geeks seek community because the majority spend their early lives shunned by it.

So their interests are more varied and the only thing geeks love more than their fetish properties is conglomerating with other geeks and talking about the merits and splendor and deficiencies of said properties. There is, however, one glaring, pulsating exception.

We don’t talk about porn.

Geeks per capita consume immense amounts of pornographic materials of all varieties, but it doesn’t make it into their social networking updates. That seems normal to you. But it shouldn’t. Not in the abstract, not when you take into account just how communal they are about virtually every other fetish property. It chokes your Twitter stream all day. Here’s a hilarious internet meme. Here’s a link to a song I’m listening to and enjoying. I just went to see this movie and here’s what I think of it. I’m reading this book and I need to share how it makes me feel. I just bought new shoes. I’m salivating over this piece on Etsy.com. This new Playstation/Xbox/Wii game pwns all that exists or ever will. It’s fucking endless and no consumer stone is unturned.

But you never see someone in your stream tweet about the hot new update on their subscription porn site of non-record.

People connect any discussion of porn to TMI. We don’t want to know about the porn you watch because we don’t want to know about your sexual habits or proclivities, despite how like-minded we’re presumed to be. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, I recently viewed this porn clip, it’s very good, I think you might also enjoy it.” End of discussion. It’s not a come on. It doesn’t mean you don’t or can’t respect personal boundaries (and the people with boundary issues have them regardless of this discussion).

There’s nothing wrong with having a private experience, but mandating that any experience is a solitary or taboo one pisses me off. Knee-jerking pisses me off. Perpetuating emotionally and psychologically arresting puritanical values and shame-based silence pisses me off. It also marginalizes adult performers and adult filmmakers, many of whom are skilled and talented individuals. It denies them stature and credence and mastery of craft. It denies that such a craft even exists. It devalues what they do, how they do it, and who they are.

I find myself these days possessing increasingly less patience and tolerance for any social attitude that does shit like that, wherever it’s aimed.

I was recently watching a scene produced by Naughty America starring Ginger Lynn Allen (or just Ginger Lynn). Ginger Lynn Allen is an old school porn star who came up in the 80’s. She was the chick in Metallica’s “Turn the Page” video (from wence pretty much the entire plot of Boogie Nights was ripped). She stopped doing porn for a long spell and transitioned fairly successfully to fabled legitimate media. The first time I ever saw her was in the live-action PC game Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger playing Chief Tech Rachel Coriolis. Which made the later realization she was a porn star way hotter. This is my own bit of geek cred.

She’s now 47. She recently made a second comeback to the porn industry. She looks fabulous. She has that filled-out frame slimmer women get as they mature and a confidence and wisdom and gait to match it. In addition to all of that, I was struck by another observation. It was the kind of unexpected moment of beholding you have when you pass a prodigious street performer in a park, or really intuit what went into creating a particularly moving painting you find yourself admiring.

Ginger Lynn Allen? She really knows how to fuck.

Seriously, the woman has a talent for sex that goes beyond just watching two people get it on in an everyday fashion, even an everyday porn fashion. It’s impressive. She’s impressive. Hot, to be sure, but also just a plain impressive performer skilled in sensuality. She possesses practiced movement and technique and an innate sense of what pleases her partner as well as what is pleasing to the eye. She is committed to it, invested in it, and she conveys that in a way that draws intense empathy from the viewer. She transcends the cheap scamming of her physical attributes to create an intense experience for that viewer.

Most people have no ability to appreciate any of that. All they see, all they will ever see, is two people fucking. Whether they’re turned on by it, repulsed by it, or indifferent to it, we are trained as a culture to respond to the surface level and only the surface level.

There’s a distinct difference between sexuality and sensuality. Sensuality is a practice, a conscious intent. It is equal parts science and art. It has been a discipline perfected and taught through the ages. The Kama Sutra was every bit the serious doctrine as the bushido code of the samurai. It has also been inherently exploitive throughout history because women have been inherently exploited throughout history and still are in much of the world. So it’s easy to write off the professional practice of it by a woman in particular as objectifying and therefore invalid.

But I’m talking about the modern porn industry in America. The mainstream smut industry has become quite possibly the least exploitive venue for women in this country. It’s the one business arena where they do not make less than their male counterparts for doing the same job. In fact they earn many, many times more. They are shot-callers. There are more female porn producers and directors than there are women CEO’s in corporate America. Women own the porn industry in this country and they fucking know it.

You can’t fall back on exploitation when you talk about porn, not anymore. All that’s left is your holdover aversion, your gag reflex or your moral dilemma or your radical feminist training. And I’m not going to sit here, a white American male, and argue feminism with any woman. You take issue freely as you please on that basis.

But invalidating what a woman like Ginger Lynn Allen does on that basis is bullshit.

The most illustrative and direct correlation I can think of is combat sports. Boxing, MMA, kickboxing, wrestling, and every other individual martial arts system with its own professional ring and tournament circuits. There is very real, very Siamese connective tissue between combat sports and porn. Like porn, it’s a fan-driven billion-dollar industry based around paid appreciation of physical spectacle. And porn requires physical conditioning (a lot of which is centered on muscles professional fighters never have to fucking worry about, incidentally), so don’t tell me being a skilled athlete is totally different.

I personally attach a great sense of pride and honor and nobility to professional martial artists. I’m not the only one. Boxing, wrestling, and martial arts are Olympic sports. We celebrate these people as champions and heroes. There’s nothing noble about being a porn star, much less a talented porn star. The rub is that full contact combat sports and porn are both equally arbitrary. They’re both driven by perhaps our most primal instincts, fighting and fucking. As institutions they both thrive on igniting those primal instincts in the masses that consume them. They’re performance based, both intensely physical in nature, and both require a serious mental commitment.

Of course, you can say there is no art, no practice, and no talent to a woman getting railed in a porno and in a lot of cases you’d be right. An adult film actress who just lies there and takes it is the equivalent of a brawler who overwhelms his opponent with arm punches. Both are bereft of technique, bereft of passion, and in it strictly for business. Which is exactly why true greatness and dedication is celebrated in combat sports and why it should be equally celebrated in porn.

There is nothing detached about a Ginger Lynn Allen performance. This is not a woman closing her eyes and thinking about pretty flowers and trying not to remember how her stepfather had boundary issues or any stereotypical crap like that. That is a woman wholly committed to what she’s doing, enjoying what she’s doing, and mastering the craft of what she is doing, all in an effort to illicit the proscribed response from her audience on a level rarely seen.

And yet she’s a whore, not a champion.

There’s no public pride in mastering sensuality. There’s no organization like there is with combat sports, and that’s really the key difference. You won’t find a fucking dojo (in which “fucking” is a noun and a verb rather than an adjective) sandwiched between Papa John’s and a CVS Pharmacy in your local strip mall. Classes that teach sensuality exist in living rooms and private parties and are largely held to be a novelty by most Americans.

Maybe if there were neighborhood schools and brand name training centers for the sensual aspects of human sexuality we’d all be more well adjusted and liberated for it. Think about that. Soft sterile mats and crotchless, nippleless sensuality training gis. “We can’t have dinner with the Goldsteins on Thursday, honey, that’s when I have my sensuality class. I’m testing for my pink belt.”

I would love to live in that world. It doesn’t devalue sex and it doesn’t preclude the concept of “making love” because that’s based on emotional content. As long as you have the capacity to love someone, to be in love with them, or just feel a deep emotional connection to them, it doesn’t matter how much purely physical sex you’ve had or will have or how abstractly you study sensuality.

Until then I still appreciate watching someone practice their chosen craft on a high level, no matter what it is. With the possible exception of poker. Because that is some boring shit. Ginger Lynn Allen will never be praised for her sensual talent, at least never on the level Muhammad Ali is praised as a boxer or Fedor Emelianenko is praised as a mixed martial artist. But from an empirical standpoint there’s no difference, at least no difference that I recognize. I hold equal esteem. Hidehiko Yoshida is the greatest judoka of the modern era. Billy Robinson is the best catch wrestler the world has ever seen. And Ginger Lynn Allen is an unparalleled master of sensuality.

It’s okay to admit it and encourage others to check out her work and appreciate it on the same level, or any level at all. And I did it without mentioning masturbation or my penis once.

Well, almost.